Twilight Whispers

by Barbara Delinsky

  Chapter 11

  By the fall of 1952 the Whytes and Warrens had become comfortable residents of Dover. Six of their children attended the local schools, and Natalie and Lenore—not to mention the Morells and McNees—had become familiar faces in and around the community. If Jack and Gil’s faces weren’t as familiar, simply because they were on the go much of the time, their reputations took up the slack. Jack became known as one of the town’s most promising rising entrepreneurs, while Gil, whose legal and political expertise preceded him, was a shoo-in for the local seat in the State Legislature being vacated by the longtime, retiring representative.

  Natalie kept herself busy with the children, as much to compensate for Jack’s absences—he’d been off and running since spring, when the novelty of the house had worn off—as to satisfy herself that her children would know their mother as she had never known her own. She was intimately involved in every one of their activities, a double challenge after December of that year, when she gave birth to a daughter, Anne. Though she hired a nurse to take care of the baby, more often than not as the spring of 1953 unfolded Anne was on Natalie’s own hip while she cheered at Nick’s Little League games, attended Mark’s school plays, and struggled with Jordan’s labored attempts to learn to read.

  Moreover, she was nearly as involved with the Warren children as she was with her own, since so many of the youngsters’ activities overlapped. Lenore was usually present—her heart was in the right place—but when Peter urged his horse into a gallop, promptly tumbled off and broke his arm, she went to pieces, leaving Natalie and Cassie to comfort the boy and see that he had the medical attention he needed. And when Laura developed a sudden and severe stutter, it was Natalie who had the presence of mind to seek out a speech therapist. And when Ben’s teacher called to say that he was terrorizing the girls in the class, it was Natalie who sat him down for a long talk.

  Lenore was in a perpetual state of nervousness. She worried about anything and everything, from Gil’s political stability to Deborah’s propensity for the croup to Ben’s refusal to drink milk. Where Natalie was happy enough to enjoy all she had at a particular moment, Lenore was obsessed with what she might not have in the future. She envisioned Gil being unseated in the next election or having a sudden downturn in his law practice. She lived in dire fear of a fire or hurricane that might destroy the Dover house and leave them with a major loss.

  She worked herself into such a state that migraine headaches became a common occurrence, sending her to bed with the shades drawn, a warm cloth over the bridge of her nose and strict orders that she wasn’t to be disturbed. The children weathered her absences well. They had long since learned that either Cassie or Natalie could better handle any problems that arose, and since there was genuine love coming from both of those sources they simply appreciated Lenore when she was with them, and accepted her absences when she was not.

  In the fall of 1953 Jack Whyte merged his varied interests into one large corporation, the Whyte Estate. The airline was doing well, swallowing any number of smaller ones in the process. Jack had half a dozen hotels to his name and they too thrived. The electronics plant in Waltham had expanded and was operating under full capacity even after the armistice was signed ending the Korean War.

  Cassie Morell learned all this not from Natalie or Lenore but from Gil Warren himself. She made it a point to linger later at the main house on evenings when Gil was there, and though such evenings were infrequent, they were special to her. A pattern emerged. She would put the children to bed, rush to the cottage to kiss Kenny good night, then return to see if she could get something to eat or drink for Gil. He would gesture her into his den and they would talk.

  He had all the patience in the world for Cassie, engaging her in conversation on topics ranging from the children’s progress in school to his own progress on a legal case to Eisenhower’s progress in the White House. He seemed to enjoy himself, opening up to her freely, knowing he could count on intelligent responses, intuitively trusting that what they discussed would go no farther than that room.

  At times she felt more like his wife than his housekeeper, and her sentiments on that score were mixed. On the one hand, she felt guilty; she liked Lenore and understood that the woman was of a fragile disposition. On the other hand she felt defiant; Lenore chose to closet herself in her room, away from her husband, who apparently appreciated the company, and if he sought Cassie out for that company—she never thought of it as the other way around—it was his right.

  The simple pleasure of Gil’s nearness was enough to keep Cassie coming back for more. Not only did he stimulate her mind in a way Henry did not, but he made her feel like a woman as no other man had ever done. It was in his eyes, warm, dark and penetrating, lingering on her face, her hands, her breasts. Though he never made a move to touch her in a way that could be considered improper, she would leave his den feeling as though she had been caressed from head to toe, and the feeling would warm her for days.

  Henry, conversely, was leaving her cold. Oh, he was still the same harmless man she had married, but they seemed to have increasingly different tastes. While Henry wanted to spend his days off at the dog track, Cassie preferred to go to a movie, or shopping, or to the Museum of Fine Arts. While excitement for Henry was an evening of watching baseball on a barroom TV with his old Brookline buddies, Cassie found a good book far more exhilarating. While Henry wanted Kenny to know, even at the tender age of three, that he was not a Warren, Cassie was intent on believing that, for all practical purposes, he was.

  In time Henry and Cassie simply began to go their own ways. Cassie would have been perfectly happy with the arrangement had it not been for the fact that she sensed an undercurrent of frustration in her husband. Mindful of the vow she had made to herself when she had married him, she dutifully suggested, at least once or twice a month, that they do something together. Though it was a stopgap measure, it seemed to mollify him.

  Indeed, she wasn’t the only one with mollification in mind. Jack and Gil were ever in the market for appeasements for their wives. In early 1954 they found an ideal one.

  While the eyes of the nation were focused on the Supreme Court as it debated the issue of racial segregation in the schools, the two men’s focus was on an island off the coast of Maine. They liked the idea of an exclusive retreat for their families. They liked the sound of a private resort to call their own. They liked the location; it was an easy trip and, most importantly, one that would enable them to tuck away their families for summers and vacations while they were free to shuttle back and forth at will.

  So they bought the land, did what repair work was necessary to make the old Victorian house there livable, and proudly introduced their families to the site.

  Natalie and Lenore, who had secretly had their eye on a summer home in Bar Harbor, quickly decided that having their own island was that much more prestigious. They liked the idea that there was only one house—it rather reminded them of a castle surrounded by a gigantic moat to ward off the riffraff—and since they spent so much time together and their families merged so well the idea of sharing the house appealed to them.

  The children were totally innocent of thoughts of prestige or status or appeasement. They simply saw trail after trail to race along, hiding place after hiding place to scrunch up in, endless supplies of sand for castles and mud pies and stuffing down one another’s bathing suits. They were in heaven.

  If the reactions had been tallied, they would have amounted to a landslide victory for Jack and Gil, which was a good thing, because landslides were hard to come by. Gil had decided to take a step up and run for State Senator, and he faced formidable opposition in the incumbent. Lenore, predictably, was in a state of panic, for which Gil, predictably, had little patience.

  “But you’re doing just fine in the House!”

  “By the time my present term ends I’ll have been there for six years. All along I’ve said it was a beginning; it’s time I moved on.”

&nb
sp; “Maybe in a few more years—”

  “Now, Leonore. I’m already forty-two. In a few more years I’ll be nothing but older. I’ve gone as far as I can in the House. The Senate is the logical next step.”

  “Where will you be if you lose?”

  “I won’t lose.”

  “But Dover already has a strong senator. Will Crocker is well liked. He isn’t about to retire, and he certainly won’t graciously bow out of the race. How will you handle him?”

  “I’ll campaign long and hard.”

  Not only did Gil campaign long and hard, but his efforts were aided by an eleventh-hour newspaper report that Will Crocker had accepted significant funds from a group of builders who were lobbying in the Legislature for special privileges. Lacking adequate time to defend himself against the bribery smear, Crocker lost the election.

  Gil took his seat, but Lenore suffered more deeply from this victory than she had those in the past. She believed that Crocker’s timely misfortune was one coincidence too many, and though the source of the fateful revelation was a mystery, she had her suspicions. She remembered her father, knew how quickly and unnecessarily lives could be ruined, feared that Gil, for all his back room maneuvering, would one day be on the losing end of the stick.

  And she felt helpless to prevent it. Gil wouldn’t listen to her fears. She discussed them with Natalie, who skirted around them in conversations with Jack, but Jack was as wrapped up in ambition as Gil was, and as confident of his success.

  The sense of powerlessness that plagued Lenore, the sense of being at the whim of a fate she couldn’t see or touch or control, took a tragic twist with the arrival of 1955. Ben took sick. It began with a sore throat and quickly developed into a high fever. The family doctor prescribed aspirin and bed rest, but when the symptoms escalated into muscle pains and spasms, then stiffness, Ben was immediately hospitalized.

  Lenore was distraught. Gil spent every free minute he had with his son in the hospital. The other children were frightened. A worried Natalie kept her brood away from the Warren house, though she knew that they had probably already been exposed. Cassie had nightmares of Kenny falling sick. And the newspapers didn’t help. They were filled with stories of the epidemic, portraying polio accurately, if dramatically, as the heartrending scourge it was.

  Ben had the best of medical care, but even the best couldn’t prevent the onset of paralysis, or his death after a valiant ten-day fight.

  The funeral was small and private. For once Gil had no thought of public appearances, the only images in his mind being those of his ten-year-old son’s body encased in an iron lung, then, and even more devastatingly, in a child-sized coffin. Lenore was no help to him in his sorrow; she was in a world of mourning all her own, one that she allowed no one to enter and share.

  For days their grief was compounded by the fear that one or more of the other children would take sick. Even when the incubation period passed and that initial fear subsided, there was the chance that they would pick up the disease from another source, so a more general worry remained.

  Brisk winds and occasional driving rains notwithstanding, the island was a particular godsend in the early spring of 1955. Lenore and Natalie rushed the children there the day school vacation began, and there they stayed for a full month. It was the first time since Ben’s death that any of them found a measure of peace. While Lenore continued to grieve for Ben, suffering long bouts of depression, she found some solace in the knowledge that the other children were protected while they remained on the island, isolated from the world. Natalie, too, felt safer there, and that sense of security spread to the children, the oldest of whom had been deeply disturbed by Ben’s death. Natalie spent long hours with them—with Nick and Laura, who were thirteen, Mark, who was twelve, Peter, who was nearly ten, and Jordan, who was eight—individually and together, trying to explain that Ben was at peace, that life held some tragedies that couldn’t be explained, that polio had nothing to do with genetics and that they could not live in fear of its imminent onset.

  They seemed to respond to her counseling, or perhaps it was simply time and distance that set them at ease. Whatever the case, they gradually relaxed and returned to a semblance of their spunky selves.

  The fact that Jack and Gil joined their families for only a day here or there bothered Natalie and Lenore less than usual. Anyone who had had contact with the outside world was a vague threat. Even Cassie and Sarah, who periodically took turns returning to Dover to see to the men’s needs there, were welcomed back to the island with a certain amount of trepidation.

  It was during one such trip to Dover that Cassie learned the depth of Gil Warren’s grief. She had assumed that he had recovered from his son’s death since he was back to work with a passion, and, as was her way, she went to his den to check on him before she turned in for the night.

  She had expected that he would be pouring through papers, but he wasn’t in the den. Driven on by a sixth sense, she quietly made her way to the second floor of the house. The light that beckoned came not from the master bedroom, but from Peter’s room, the one he and Ben had shared.

  Gil was seated on the bed that had been Ben’s. His head was bowed; his arms hung limply by his sides. The toys that had been Ben’s—the trains and soldiers and stuffed dogs—had been long since removed, leaving a starkness that suddenly hit Cassie as it hadn’t during the many times she had been in the room since the child’s death.

  She thought of leaving Gil to his private mourning, but her heart grieved for him too greatly. She knocked lightly on the doorjamb. When he looked up, seeming dazed and distant, she spoke in a near whisper.

  “Is there anything you’d like?”

  He simply stared at her for a minute, then shook his head.

  “Can I help?”

  Still he stared, then shook his head again.

  She desperately wanted to do something, because his devastation tore into her, but she had to respect his wish to be alone. “I’ll be at the cottage then,” she said very quietly. Turning, she went back downstairs, then out the back door and across the short distance to her own home.

  Without turning on a light she undressed and slipped on her nightgown, then crawled into the bed she had always shared with Henry, who was back at the island. She didn’t mind sleeping alone; it was a relief after nights of lying by the edge of the bed to allow leeway for his sprawling form. She had learned to settle for her fantasies to keep her warm, since, for whatever reasons, Henry’s body had never quite done the trick.

  She was wide awake with her thoughts when a soft knock came at the door. Whether alerted by that same sixth sense that had led her earlier to Ben’s room she wasn’t sure, but she knew that Gil had come. Without so much as a glance out the window she opened the door and stepped aside to let him in.

  He had tossed on a jacket but it was unzipped. His hands were tucked in its pockets and the shirt beneath it lay carelessly open to a point midway down his chest.

  Closing the door, Cassie came to stand beside him, where she waited quietly for him to speak or move or do something. He stared at the floor for a long time. His dark hair was mussed, the shadow on his jaw pronounced. He looked exhausted, but it was more than a natural late evening fatigue. She wondered when the last time was that he had had a good night’s sleep, wondered exactly how many of his feelings he had hidden over the past weeks.

  Gil was an icon of strength; the world, indeed, his own family, saw him as a tower of steel. What Cassie saw now was something different, something every bit as admirable and distinctly human. In a strange way she felt blessed.

  Slowly, and with a hesitance she had never seen in him, he raised his eyes to hers. His voice was hoarse, an aching croak.

  “I need someone, Cassie. I feel so cold … and alone.”

  It was all she had to hear. She didn’t care that someone could have been anyone; the fact was that he had come to her. Given the love she had felt for him for years, she knew what she wanted to do.
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br />   Carefully, as though he were wounded on the outside as well as the inside, she eased his jacket from his broad shoulders. “Come,” she said then and led him down the short hall to the bedroom. When he was sitting on the edge of the bed she gently unbuttoned his shirt and drew it off. Then she eased him back to the pillow and just as gently removed his shoes, socks and trousers. When he lay in nothing but his underwear she drew the blankets up, slid onto the bed beside him and took him in her arms.

  With his head cradled against her breasts, she whispered, “I’ll warm you. I’ll do whatever you need. It hurts me so to see you this way.”

  The only sound he made was a choked one as he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her closer. And she simply held him, giving him time, willing every bit of the love she felt into him to stave off his loneliness and sorrow.

  It was awhile before he stirred. She was stroking his back when she felt the first tentative movement of his mouth near her breast, and almost simultaneously with the loosening of her arms, he did the same to give his lips greater freedom.

  Cassie had never felt what she did then, the wild, burning surge of passion through her limbs. She tried to temper it, but it was hard, because he was using his lips and tongue, stroking her nipple through the cotton of her gown, and she couldn’t do anything about the soft moan that slipped from her throat.

  She could do something when his hands went to the hem of her gown, though, and she did. Raising her hips, she helped him ease the soft fabric up and over her head. It was the very first time she had ever been naked before a man—Henry took sex as a prim affair—but she was proud of her body, proud that a man like Gil found her attractive. And he did. She could feel it in the way his arms quivered, in the way his stomach tightened, in the way he moved over her and pressed his hips into hers.